Recently, world events and natural disasters have caused more attention to be given to the intermixing of environmental, economic, and humanitarian needs around the world. For example, the Pacific Ocean tsunami, earthquakes in Haiti and Peru, and Hurricane Katrina all caused immense humanitarian needs and devastating loss of life. First responders to such disasters normally set up tents to house refugees. The assumption is that the stay in the tents will be brief. However, depending on the disaster, the results often show otherwise. Tents are only useful in limited climate conditions. They also wear out over time, forcing residents to piece together sticks, branches, scrap metal or plastic for tent repair. The relatively few plastic containers in disaster relief sites are used mainly for water vessels, even though many are discarded fuel containers.
One example of such a scenario is the Abu Shouk IDP camp in El Fasher, Northern Darfur. There, refugees were placed in tents on a vast scale numbering in the thousands, where they denuded the vegetation during their difficult and lengthy duration of stay. These lengthy stays under conditions of severe deprivation tax the host nation's natural resources and increase the environmental degradation of the host landscapes via stripped vegetation and toxic garbage dumps. These environmental burdens naturally lead to political pressure on the host government to insist on shorter stays. In war torn areas, shifts in zones of control may force camp dwellers to flee approaching combatants, even in the absence of “official” pressure.
Other environmental and economic issues develop more slowly, such as the issue of widespread and burgeoning use of plastic beverage bottles and the enormous amount of waste caused by their disposal. One estimate states that Americans consume 2.5 million plastic bottles every five minutes or about 263 billion bottles each year. Approximately one-quarter of all plastic bottles are made with PET plastic for drinking water or soft beverages.
Although some consumers recycle, mountains of bottles still go to waste. Over the past decade recycling rates in America have decreased from over 30% to just over 20%, meaning close to 80% of plastic bottles end up in the waste stream. Approximately 50 billion PET bottles alone are wasted each year. Much of that waste ends up in landfills, but a significant amount ends up in roadside dumps or, even worse, in rivers and oceans. The “Pacific Trash Vortex,” is also known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It is steered by prevailing currents to a still zone north of Hawaii. The Vortex has four to six million tons of a soup-like garbage mix that hovers just under the surface in an area the size of Texas or France. It is estimated that 80% of the Vortex is from plastic, with a large portion being PET plastic bottles.
Due to expanding populations increasing the demand for drinking water, food, and consumables, including in disaster zones, the need for plastic bottles will only increase.
There is, then, a compelling need for plastic bottle designs that have secondary uses such that consumers will contemplate a fuller life cycle for the bottles. Such uses could increase recycling rates, or re-use rates, thereby lowering the volume of waste bottles disposed of each year and in the decades ahead.